----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Witty" cwitty@newtonlabs.com Newsgroups: gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 10:43 PM Subject: Re: Re: possible interwiki solution
Well, I think a proposal like this could still reduce duplication significantly, and would work fine even in the above scenario. (Note: I haven't looked up the real article names; I'm making up article names for the following.) For instance, you could have [[en:Vulcan]] (and [[ja:Vulcan]], and [[fr:Vulcan]], etc.) refer to [[interwiki:Vulcan]]; [[interwiki:Vulcan]] would refer to [[en:Vulcan]], [[ja:Vulcan]], [[fr:Vulcan]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. The German article [[de:Star Trek Races]] would refer to [[interwiki:Star Trek Races]], which would refer to [[en:Star Trek]], [[ja:Star Trek]], [[fr:Star Trek]], and [[de:Star Trek Races]]. This cuts the number of lists-of-interwiki-links to maintain from 4 to 2. (I don't know if it actually reduces the amount of work involved in maintaining interwiki links, because I don't know how sophisticated the bots are.)
Carl Witty
In general the reduction of duplicition will be much larger. Say an certain article exists on 21 languages. Then on each of these languanges there will eventually be 20 interwiki links to the other articles. In total 21x20 = 420 links. If the title of one of these changes, it needs 20 edits on the 20 other languages.
In this proposal, if you have one central location with all interwiki links, you only have to change 1 link. This means a reduction of editting effort from 20 edits to only 1. You only have 21 links in the central database, versus 420 links in the current system.
And in the future, possibly not so far away with our current growth of languages and articles, the reduction (in case of 100 languages) will be 100 to 1. This is an enormous reduction of editing load, searching for articles in the database, involvement of people and bots, who can do other useful things.
Elly